The Automatic Earth - Foreclosure and QE

Ilargi: On to the popular topics of the day.

The Foreclosure Crisis

What foreclosure crisis? The US government has been bailing out banks for three solid years now, and there's still anyone alive who believes they’re going to drop them over mere technicalities? I like idealism up to a point, but.... 

Everyone in Washington has the same line: bad things may have happened, but we couldn't hinder the industry, now could we? Da show must go on! They even say stuff like, paraphrased: 'there's no proof that anyone evicted so far could have stayed put if their lenders had not broken the law'. If you feel that sounds reasonable, and that's the main point you get out of this mess, then you too should look at a career in politics.

This whole legal issue goes back many decades, try the 1930's, and it was precisely because there once were times that people got thrown out on mere technicalities that present day requirements pertaining to foreclosures became part of US law. 

In the past few years these laws have been and still are broken, no lack of proof for that, but the White House official point of view is the most important thing they take away from this is that the show must go on? Nothing has changed, and nothing ever will, not until this thing breaks up in ugly ways.

Many of the loans we're addressing here were sold based on false, that is illegal, documents (stated income, you name it), and now they're being foreclosed on using illegal documents too. So where's the convictions, where's the arrests? Ah well, never mind. 

Which reminds me, I have this great link to ease us into popular topic no. 2: 


Quantitative Easing

If Obama et al. would go after the banks for the foreclosure fraudulence, QE 2, coming up in a matter of days/weeks, simply couldn’t work. How are you going to get liquidity back into the financial system if you’re suing the well-deserved heebees out of the banking system at the same time? Hey, it would shatter the entire illusion. And yes, that's what it is.

All those people who claim that QE doesn't work, that QE 1 didn’t, 2 won't, yada,yada, you don't get it. QE works like charm. Just not for you, or for the purpose it's advertised for. 

It won't get banks back into lending, nothing will, and it won't get anyone a job or a home or anything else. What it WILL do, though, is transfer another inordinate amount of money from the public to the private sector. QE 2 isn't meant to alleviate YOUR problems, it never was nor will be. Come on, be honest, what government program in the past 3 years has done anything for you? 

QE 1 and 2 through 826 have, and always will have, only one objective in mind: to clear toxic assets from bank vaults, and at the same time transfer good non-toxic money to those same banks. It is the greatest swindle in history after Fannie and Freddie. Move over Charles Ponzi!

See, you may think you have a problem. But your government says it's the banks that have the problem. And that they're more important than you. So they are handed your money, and you are NOT handed theirs. Got it now? Why so slow? It's been three years!

What the banks do with all that new money is two things: 1) they place it with the Fed, in Treasuries and such, and 2) they go place wagers in international markets, stocks, derivatives, guns, you get the idea, whatever gets them profits and bonuses. In both cases, they make more, at less risk, than if they would lend it to you. Look, you guys were easy pickings for a bit there when you were all signing those fraudulent home loans, but now y'all got one of those, so where would the bonuses come from? 

And isn't that the greatest show on earth, Wall Street announcing record payrolls for its geniuses when 1) they wouldn't have a job if not for the future tax revenues of the very Americans who are losing their homes and jobs as we speak, and 2) some 90% of their employers have just been caught with their red-hot hands in the foreclosure cookie-jar?

Record numbers of foreclosures, record unemployment numbers sizzling just below the surface, and record bonuses for the very bankers that got bailed out with the very money that belongs to those very same foreclosed and jobless US citizens. 

These days, that’s the way we spell New York. And Washington. And no criminal indictments, other than for a few poor sods in Illinois who can't pay their bills.

Here's a few numbers I picked up along the way today:

$13,624,678,196,435.07 
Public debt as of 10/06 (U.S. Dept. of Treasury)

310,435,842 
Latest population (U.S. Census Bureau)

$43,888.87 
Amount owed by every man, woman and child (See above)

$550,000,000,000 (est)
Amount financed at 10 years or longer (U.S. Dept. of Treasury)

$13,074,678,196,435.07 
Amount to be refinanced within 10 years (See above)

53% ($6,929,579,444,110.58)
Amount of debt maturing in 1 to 3 years. (U.S. Dept. of Treasury)

-35% 
Corporate tax receipts on a rolling 12 month period. (U.S. Dept. of Treasury)

Yup. $7 trillion in US debt needs to be rolled over in the next 3 years. Another $6 trillion in the 7 years after that. And that's before any new debt commitments are taken on, which they presently are at some $1-1,5 trillion per year. With corporate tax receipts down 35% y-o-y. 

But no, that doesn’t spell the demise of the US dollar, really, it doesn't. It spells the demise of the American people. 

I told you, QE works.


FULL POST HERE